Do you have teenagers at home? Honestly, I think these kids are going to eat the house down. An entire flat of cherries and raspberries gone in one day. Two pounds of flank steak devoured tonight at dinner. I’m not sure I can make it through the summer at the pace we are going.

This recipe calls for cooking the flank steak on the stove with a little seasoning but no marinating. I don’t know about you, but I have never had a good experience with lightly seasoned flank steak. I decided to let the steak sit for a bit with a drizzle of olive oil, a generous amount of salt and pepper, a few cloves of sliced garlic, and a handful of cilantro. I rubbed this into only one side of the meat and let it sit at room temperature while I prepared the radish salsa. We had two pounds of steak (double what the recipe called for) but I did not double the radish salsa. This turned out to be a good move because there was plenty for the kids. If you are serving this meal only to adults and need to increase your steak amount, I would increase the salsa too. All of my older kids tried the salsa and all but one continued to add the salsa to their second and third tacos (I’m pretty sure one of the kids skipped salad entirely and had five tacos). This dish got a resounding vote of confidence from all four teens tonight as a definite repeat.

The radish salsa is an easy mix of chopped radish, green onion, cilantro, lime, olive oil, salt and pepper. I didn’t measure the olive oil (although I am pretty sure that I put in less than the suggested one tablespoon) and thought the finished salsa had a bit too much oil. Otherwise, the flavor was great and it added a nice bite to the tacos. I decided to grill my flank steak instead of cooking it on the stove. I figured that this would give the steak a bit more flavor. I would love to tell you how long I grilled the steak on each side, but honestly, I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off and got lucky that my steak was cooked perfectly (at least for my diners).

We served our steak tacos with a green salad and a quick batch of cilantro-lime vinaigrette (a special request from one of the boys). One of the other boys experimented with the dressing in his tacos and said that it was amazing. I’ll take his word for it. My poor husband, who had to work late, was greeted with salad and three slices of steak upon his return home. He chopped up the steak and added it to scrambled eggs for dinner. From all accounts, that was a win also. Overall, I’d say this was a pretty versatile recipe. And even as slow as I was moving in the kitchen, this meal was still on the table in well under an hour. I’d give it a try. Let me know if you have any tips for me.

I’ll be hiding out in this secret garden today if anyone needs me... #wishthiswasmyyard

School picture day. And it finally feels like fall in #houston

Today is #dayofthegirl , a day created by the UN to celebrate the strength of girls and acknowledge the barriers girls face in all over the world. Yesterday in our #girlscout meeting, we made pins to wear today and we worked thru the @wagggs_world curriculum around International Day of the Girl and gender equality. I can best sum up the girls’ discussion by quoting one of the girls: “Mind blown.” (Imagine this with full 8yo drama quotient and hand motions. It was rich.) 👧🏾👧🏼👧🏽👧🏿👧🏻 I wrote a big, long caption about the importance of this day in a global context but the fact of the matter is that my 8yo daughter, who proudly wore a pin last night to dinner (swipe left), won’t wear her pin to school today because she thinks the boys will make fun of her. “They expect me to like certain things and act a certain way, Mom.” Full stop. 👧🏽👧🏻👧🏾👧🏿👧🏼 I’m angry. And I’m incredibly sad. And I’m sharing that here because real life. 👧🏻👧🏽👧🏿👧🏼👧🏾 I get that kids will be kids and the boys in question certainly don’t have an intent to exclude girls simply because they are girls. Or if they do have that intent it’s because both genders think the other stinks at this age. I get that my daughter’s insecurities are her own, her assumptions about what may happen are her own, and I’m sure I’ve contributed to both by being a loud mouth feminist. But y’all. Our kids - our daughters and our sons - deserve better than this. They deserve better than to continue to live within the confines of worn out stereotypes of gender roles. I’m open to ideas. How are we going to change this? #bethechange

I don’t typically celebrate “wins”. To be clear, it’s not that I object to public acknowledgment of success, just that it’s more my nature to move on to the next thing once (if ever) something is complete. It’s also possible that my idea of a win has always been substantially larger than getting dinner on the table. Hence the parenthetical in the previous sentence. 🌮🥟🥞 Today, however, I want to acknowledge some wins and I want to do so publicly so that those of you reading this who are like me, who have what others call “high expectations” (virgos and type As anyone?), and who beat yourselves up over the incomplete items on the list instead of noticing the things that you actually did (and that probably weren’t even on the list to begin with) - YES ! I'm talking to you! You might possibly recognize yourself. (Also that was certainly a run-on sentence. Let’s move on.) 🏅🏆🎖 Today, I said yes to yoga with a fellow mom who I don’t know well, which was uncomfortable on more than one front. And it turned out to be amazing. Health and well-being win. 🧘🏻‍♀️🧘🏻‍♀️🧘🏻‍♀️ Today, I intended to join in with One Room Challenge for the 5th time. I sat down and wrote a blog post about why I was participating only to find in the writing that I no longer felt the need to participate. So I didn’t. And on top of that, I didn’t feel that the time writing was time wasted. Down with busy for the sake of busy win. 🏡🏡🏡 Today, my son lost his campaign for representative of his third grade classroom. He came home in tears. But we talked, and he went from never trying anything new again to never trying things with voting to maybe trying things with voting in a couple of years. He ended the day in smiles. I’m not going to lie. There may have been an ice cream sandwich involved. Parenting win. ✅✅✅ Today, I got real dinner on the table, with vegetables and everything, for the third day in a row, despite soccer and music lessons and whatever else. And my kids ate it. And we talked while we ate dinner. Normal, right? I’m going with a win. 🥗🍝🍪 So there it is. The little things have big impact. Tell me, if you’ve made it this far, what was your win today? #ryhsyinnercircle

Thirteen years married to this guy today. Pretty damn lucky. #adventureisoutthere